Tim Washer, Senior Marketing Manager of Cisco, joins Robert Collins and Richard Caines of The Pulse Network to discuss his 5 Tips in 10 Minutes for Content Marketers looking for creative strategies to implement in their marketing campaigns.

1. Produce a Documentary on a Shoestring Budget

Find an author, speaker, or well known industry speaker who can help tell stories of invention, failure, and what lead to where your industry is now. By telling stories about your industry rather than about your company, it’s much less of a marketing message and will gain more traction on YouTube.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to connect with people, and creating content that is relevant to your audience will help you build an audience that will

2. Insert Fun into a Technical Topic

Invest in having fun and creating something fun – with or without a call to action. Create something fun and entertaining as a gift to your audience for them reading your blog or visiting your website. This type of content does not necessary need to be directly related to a product or service you offer – it could be something as simple as video created by an interesting employee.

3. Create an Edutainment Video

Creating “edutainment” has the same goal as your other content – sharing relevant content and driving leads. If your audience visits your site or your blog and finds relevant content that is also entertaining, people will subscribe. If you build it, they will come.

4. Create a Humorous Video

One of the first humorous videos that Tim was involved with was the “The Art of the Sale”, created by IBM. By being self-deprecating and telling a true story that resonated with the audience, the video has millions of hits on YouTube. Tim recommends that if you are going to create a video like “The Art of the Sale”, rather than pointing back to a product marketing page, you should link your video back to a blog post that relates to the context of the video. Doing so helps you build the audience that you are trying to.

5. Use Locations to Inspire New Ideas for Video

Ask yourself, what would be a great way to visually tell a story? Is there a loose connection to your industry or business? Cisco produced a video at the Maritime Aquarium in Connecticut and produced a video about how the aquarium uses the mobile internet to enhance the experience that their visitors have. Storytelling doesn’t always have to be about your product or services, again, just make it about your industry and something relevant.

Voice of the People Segment: Butch Stearns sits down to look at what Twitter accounts are using Halloween for Marketing. Take a look at these accounts that used Halloween to help market their products!

Butch Stearns sits down with Bob Collins and Patrick Cahill to talk about sales enabled in content marketing 360:

1. Build & share content that relates to your product or service (but isn’t about it)

Think of different forms of content

-Webinar

-Interviews

-List

-White Papers

-Guest Blog post

- Newsletter

Understand that you cant always be talking about your own technology, your service when talking about sales. Put in context of your customers needs plans and desires. Never make it about yourself make it about them and their issues and how you apply solutions to help them, but also include your calls to action.

2. Have a clear plan on how content fits with in a sales program

Work with sales on

-What content to choose

-What you should learn

- How to follow up

Marketing and sales are two different departments but can work together. Marketing must do things in context to support what sales is doing. Sales directly hears and deals with clients which helps you choose the right content. Marketing needs sales and sales needs marketing. Marketing can ask sales what kind of content should be covering, and also ask what types of poll questions should be included.

3. Use education materials as a form of sales discovery

-Different forms of content can be utilized as education material

-Webinar one-on-one interviews

-Form question

If you want a long webinar with polls put thought into the polls to help content and by the content could help sales. Also notice where are viewers watching? Are they watching certain sections of your webinar? Know those questions can also help sales

4. Don’t be afraid to ask if people want to talk sales

-Utilize tools at your disposal when asking if they would like to be contacted

-Poll question

-Call out boxes

Don’t lose sign that is about sales, but you want to be informational and educational. Make yourself available to help.

5. Make content truly educational if you want a sustainable program.

-Key to nurturing

-80% of registrants are not short term leads

50% of sales come from well nurtured campaigns, the cost is less than 30%. Remember to always take a long term approach with customers.

Since we know this, considering we are also people, we can easily predict where someone’s attention is going to sway towards during their time online. You guessed it, video! But not just video, all kinds of exciting, engaging content.

The new age of content marketing addresses the issue of pulling people away from where they go online in order to sell them something, raise awareness about something, get them to enter a contest, or whatever it may be.

The issue being, people don’t like that!

Content marketing, instead of asking someone to get up from their proverbial desk to go get a cup of coffee, brings the coffee over to them, and sets it down.

Instead of pulling people towards marketing materials, we can lay them down in the line of sight we know they’re going to be visiting and already planning to interact with.

Highways don’t put toll booths on random side streets and hope people take the turn to go pay the money – they put the booths directly in the path of travel, so you have no choice but to see them and pass through them.

This isn’t to say that content marketing is forcing people to buy things they don’t want, but it is to say that the things they do want, will be in their line of sight, and aligning with their interests.

We want to hear from you! How has your brand been using content marketing to engage and attract users? Feel free to share your best tips and ideas in the comments below, or tweet us at @ThePulse.

In any sales environments it is vital to align your sales and marketing teams to garner the finest results. Lead conversion occurs when these teams work together. Frank Belzer of Kurlan & Associates shares his 5 tips for closing inbound leads in this spotlight on IMS.

1.Modify Your Sales Approach for Inbound Leads

Adjust your approach. Most inbound leads come in because they do not want to speak to a salesperson. Pad your outreach, provide context to your contact, and remember you ma

Explain to them that when people download a whitepaper, there may me more questions than answers. Maybe they will be interested in the second piece of content in addition to what downloaded.

2. Provide Context to Your Leads

You need to provide content, like material, data and information. Why is this data significant? Why is this piece of particular information important?

All content you provide must feel extremely tailored to your prospects.

3. Slow Down Your Process to Build Relationships

As a salesperson, you’re always going to be late. Once the prospect comes to you, you haven’t hide time to build the relationship. As a sales professional, you should slow things down. Encourage your prospect to get to know you.

4. Maintain Control, But Let Prospects Feel They Have It

Your prospects have been setting the course and following their own process which has lead them to your product. Sales people need to become adept at maintaining control while allow the prospect to believe they are still at the helm.

5. Guide Your Marketing Team

Marketers are concerned with appealing to the marketplace, while salespeople are focused on finding the right prospects. Sales wants prospects, while marketing is looking for interest. Sales should have an active role in guiding marketing to understanding the prospects. Salespeople need to share information about prospects with the marketing team in order to bring the right leads in.

“Everyone in our audience has an audience now.” –Butch Stearns, Chief Customer Officer at The Pulse Network. This short yet powerful statement was one of the very first and one of the most memorable statements at the conference; it reflects the times and how important it is to consider everyone in the digital sphere. With so many people with access to information and access to sharing information, it’s crucial for marketers to really hone in on increasing and fostering interactions and connections.

“It’s no longer about ‘more’; that idea is over. The idea of ‘more’ views, visits, likes, etc. is over. The true challenge is getting deeper insight and engagement.” –Robert Rose, Senior Analyst at Digital Clarity Group. Simply put: quality over quantity. Producing spam and “filler” content is not the right approach in a digital environment already bursting with content. Real quality content will naturally differentiate and attract readership.

“I’m happy to see people are getting paid to write again.” –Kelly Jo Horton, Principal Consultant at Marketo Social Marketing. People are realizing again that good writing is very valuable, especially with all the content needed to drive people to interact and come to your site. Don’t forget that great content needs that emotional hook and authentic storytelling.

“Let’s be honest. The first thing we do when we check our email is think ‘what can I delete?’” –Elyse Tager, Regional Director at Constant Contact. Sad, but true, right? There absolutely must be a purpose to sending an email and a compelling reason for reading it. Basically, make sure your message is compelling and valuable, otherwise don’t bother. There are more concerns than ever before when considering crafting emails…not just related to content and a good “hook” or subject line, but also in terms of what sort of devices people are using to check emails. Think before you send; you’re making a brand impression through your emails!

“There’s a big difference between seeing a Ferrari drive down the street and driving one” –Murad Bushnaq, President & Creative Director, Morweb CMS. In terms of customer engagement, one of the common pitfalls is companies worrying about not utilizing all the available technology and therefore jumping right in where they’re not knowledgeable. Companies need to be aware of what they should be adopting because once you’re in, you’re vested into it; it’s important to be diligent and know what tools can work best for you. Know who you are and then pick what’s right.

Butch Stearns of The Pulse Network and Debi Kleiman of MITX talk about what a business can do to smooth relations between its marketing and technology departments and truly create a functioning digital team.

There has been a dramatic shift in advertising from primarily being print and commercials. While the core of advertising remains traditional, the ways that advertisements are measured is completely different.

Watch as Jennifer Wong describes the transformation of advertising with Bob and Butch on Content Marketing 360.

Have a strategy, build your brand, and keep referring back to it. During this episode of Digital Leaders, Butch Stearns of The Pulse Network and Debi Kleinman reflect on how marketers have new ways to grow their brand through several different mediums. They also reflect on the shift of power to the media buyers who now look to data as opposed to creativity in order to keep their consumers intact in the future.

Content marketing today is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Relevant ideas must be developed in minutes, rather than days or weeks, and messaging has to center around real-time events or feedback from customers around events that happen.

By now, most marketers have heard about recent feats in the new trend of real-time marketing like Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark Super Bowl image, a tweet at the Oreo team sent out during this year’s Super Bowl power outage that earned more than 16,000 retweets and was covered in countless news stories and marketing blogs.

Most small businesses that aren’t working with a big agency or have a large marketing team at their disposal may feel left in the dark when it comes to real-time marketing. It can be hard to stay on top of trends and have the resources to create relevant messaging quickly with just a few marketers on your team.

In reality, you don’t need the resources of a giant consumer brand like Oreo to become a successful real-time marketer. What you do need is to change the way you think about your marketing strategy.

Here are 5 reasons that real-time marketing can be utilized by businesses of any size:

1. The Tools Don’t Need to Be Expensive. They Just Need to Be Used in the Right Way. In general, small businesses don’t have the resources to hire a large team or purchase expensive software to track and manage relevant brand conversations on social media. But the tools you can use for real-time marketing don’t have to be sophisticated; you just need to use what’s available appropriately. Use Twitter to search for mentions of your brand, set up notifications and create a list of key influencers, customers or prospects that follow you and then retweet and engage in other ways.

2. No One Has Real-Time Marketing Completely Figured Out. You Just Need to Get Going. Don’t be overly concerned about making a misstep or two when you’re getting used to producing content and engaging with customers so quickly. Develop a business culture that encourages speed over sloth, and be open and transparent about what you’re doing and why. Your competitors are already on social media and getting immersed in real-time marketing; you need to be doing the same.

3. Real-Time Isn’t Only About Speed. It’s Also about Listening. Real-time doesn’t only mean instant. You still need to remember that you’re engaging in a conversation by responding to things your customers are saying or inserting yourself into events that matter to your customers. Traditional marketing was about taking at your customers. Now you need to be sharing an experience with them and listening to what they have to say. That’s something any SMB can do, regardless of size.

4. Develop a Personality Online. It’s Easy to Humanize Your Brand that Way. In a world where social media is increasingly important, we judge the brands we interact with and purchase from by their personality online. We would all rather patronize a business that is friendly and knows our name, right? No matter what industry you’re in, customers want a brand to acknowledge them. Here’s a rule of thumb: If a human being wouldn’t say what you’re posting, neither should you when you’re posting on behalf of your brand.

5. People Love to Share Their Opinions. Give Them a Way to Engage. Most people tell a friend about a great experience with a business (or a terrible one). If you have happy customers, you want to make it easy for them to share their feedback. Facebook Pages and Communities can be a great place to start, but even Twitter chats with hashtags can be helpful for giving customers an outlet to share about your brand. If a customer has had a bad experience, you want to be able to address it directly, and it’s important that they have a transparent way to give feedback as well.

Has your conference flat-lined? Are you not reaching the younger generation community members? How are you engaging with them before, during and after the event? In this webcast, Rick Quinn, GM of Event Marketing Platform at The Pulse Network, gives you ten actionable tips to creating a kick-ass marketing campaign.